Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

Here’s news of a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) scheme that was pushing the page rank of malware sites up to the top of the list. As everyone know, the higher the page is on the list, the more clicks it gets (and the more clicks it gets, the higher it goes on the list… but that’s another story). The most remarkable thing about this story is the sheer size of it. There were hundreds of ‘bots seeding the internet with 40,000 malware sites. That’s a lot of nasties to watch for.

Be careful about swimming in the Internet pool. The sharks will never go away.

Jack Thompson (AKA Wacko Jacko) is facing an ethics trial for his antics in pursuit of the gaming industry. I really can’t think of a better candidate for this kind of action.

I notice he’s trying to play the “persecuted Christian” role. Sorry Jacko, attacking people for personal gain is a very Un-Christian thing to do. It looks like most of the people opposed to you are better Christians than you are.

I ran across this article about a woman from London who was fired from her job as an announcer for making up spoof messages. Any girl with a sense of humor like that is a keeper. Unfortunately, my wife won’t let me keep her. (I also have no idea whether there would be a jealous husband in the way, but I digress…).

I ran into an interesting article on /. pointing out that Maryland will begin taxing “custom computer programming”. Most of what is there is the typical mix of chicken-littles and political pundits giving their useless opinions. All perfectly fine for a blog, but useless if you are trying to find the real story.

So… can anyone out there point me toward a genuine resource for this? I live in VA, and may have an occasion to do some work in MD. I’d like to know what I can expect in the way of state taxes.

It looks like the study-hounds are beginning to advance the idea that telecommuting may not be the evil thing feared by all management. When I was permitted to, I loved telecommuting once per week. It’s a good way to break up the long week and throw a change into your daily routine. It’s also a good thing to do if you are working on something that requires long periods of isolation. I’ve found that, once I have defined a problem, I can sometimes solve it twice as fast if I attack it in silence.

There is a down side to telecommuting that the article doesn’t mention. If you work in a politically charged environment, your absence from the office may cause you to fall victim to internal politics. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend telecommuting more that once a week, twice for special circumstances. That way, you can be there to defend yourself when questions are asked.

OK, I’ve wandered around a parking lot trying to remember where I parked, but I’ve never walked off and left my car at a gas pump like this poor German guy. This certainly isn’t the guy you want babysitting your kids.

Y’all thought that I had a bad memory! Well now… All I have to say to that is… What were we talking about?

It looks like Take-Two has a serious, company-wide problem learning from it’s own lessons. They are once again caught up in a case where they hastily hid some overly graphic scenes. The last time (GTA:SA), the scenes were so bad that there was no chance of them avoiding an Adults-Only rating. This time (Manhunt 2), they hid the scenes that got them an Adults-Only rating in the first place.

Is it such a difficult concept that you should DELETE offensive scenes? …or is this just Take-Two’s way of creating controversy around a game that has gotten a mediocre welcome in the gaming community? Either way, I hope they don’t profit from this kind of behavior.